


Like Fire and Gunpowder

by Siavahda



Category: Original Work
Genre: (Except For How It Is), Age Difference, Assassins & Hitmen, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Belonging, Body Modification, Claiming, Collars, Dubious Consent, Dubious Ethics, Dysfunctional Relationships, Fucked Up, Future, Heavy BDSM, How Not to BDSM, M/M, Madness, Master/Slave, Mercenaries, Not Your Traditional Sub, Not a Love Story, Obsession, Past Brainwashing, Past Rape/Non-con, Psychopaths In Love, Science Fiction, Sexual Slavery, Slurs, Technology, There Are No Heroes Here, This Is Not How You Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 04:49:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7604074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siavahda/pseuds/Siavahda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year 2101, Colonel Simo Virtanen, Finnish ex-military, takes his mercenaries on what should be a simple recovery mission: go in, kill everyone, retrieve the son of some very important people, get out. But it's been seven years since Chimaera was a normal boy, and to get him to cooperate with his own rescue, Virtanen has to claim him. And that's when the real problems start...</p><p>Since now Chimaera won't go. And what is at first only annoying eventually becomes something more, twisting through them like a gene-virus, tying them together breath to blood. It's a tangled knot of obsession, violence, and a craving neither of them can deny, and it might just get Virtanen killed.</p><p>Because Chimaera is hiding something. The greatest taboo of the 22nd century is broken beneath his skin, and writ in his very body is a secret that could change the face of the world forever. And there are people who will do anything to get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Fire and Gunpowder

**Author's Note:**

> So basically, this is a pure wish-fulfillment story. I've had the idea for a while now, and finally sat down to attempt to write it. I have no beta, just a few very wonderful people cheering me on. It does not mean any of my other fics are abandoned! I just thought this one was going to be too much fun not to share. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do writing it!
> 
> A warning: there really _aren't_ any heroes in this story. Virtanen is a pretty appalling person, and Chimaera is not sane, and therefore isn't criminally responsible for a lot of what he does - but he's not very nice either. Although this is a much more enlightened future in several areas than our modern world, Virtanen, Chima and several other main characters are pretty casual/insensitive with regards sexual slurs and the state of Chima's sanity, so please bear that in mind if you want to read!
> 
> I have included footnotes with each chapter to explain the future-world tech and slang for you. Please let me know if any of my explanations don't make sense/are hard to understand.
> 
> And now, enjoy!

_Year 2102_

It would have taken a jeweller’s glass to recognise that the mosquito tucked away near the ceiling was no natural insect. The tiny, deceptively delicate drone streamed live audio and visuals of the room’s occupants to its pilot, with none of them any the wiser.

Half a mile away, Virtanen watched through his lenses, mentally ticking off names and faces as Hamad, the pilot, directed the robot for a full 360 view.

<All targets present and accounted for, sir,> Hamad sub-vocalised.

Virtanen could see this for himself, but he twitched a finger in the gesture Hamad’s hiveware[1] would register as acknowledgement. Scattered through the dark trees the rest of his platoon were also paying close attention, waiting for his signal to move.

He gave it.

Centuries ago, the manse before them had likely been some kind of plantation house, where white men lived in luxury while their black slaves picked cotton or cut sugar cane and died in their droves. In the intervening years someone had pulled it down and built a four-storey villa in its place, luxurious and blocky and as wound about with security as Sleeping Beauty by her thorns.

It wasn’t enough to keep them out.

Their cham-camo[2] rendered them invisible as they approached the house; the guards never saw them coming. They died quick and quiet, a hand over the mouth and a lightknife[3] slid between the ribs from behind as sweetly as a surgeon’s scalpel, bat-tabs[4] slapped over wrists to keep the chips there fuelled and convinced their hosts were still alive to avoid setting off any alarms. No noise, no mess, no fuss.

Rees jabbed a copy-cat[5] into the eye-socket of one of the guards, and a perfect mirror of his iris appeared on Virtanen’s lenses. The security scanner accepted it, and after waving the wrist of one the corpses at it—or more pertinently, the still-living chip inside the wrist—they were in.

Normally, Virtanen preferred to leave as few bodies behind him as possible; not for moral reasons, but because it was tidier, a greater demonstration of skill, and less likely to anger foreign governments. But the North American continent hadn’t had a united government for the better part of a century, none of the petty tyrants and dictators who ruled the territories that had once been the USA were going to bother him, and Virtanen and his people were being paid a very hefty bonus to kill everyone they found on the premises.

Bar one.

Now that they were past the dangerous outer security and the need for stealth—and knowing that his employers would be examining the footage of this little mission when he dropped off their package—Virtanen gave the order for a slaughter.

It was a neat, brutal bloodbath. Virtanen’s men, women and enbys[6] were among the best in the world, certainly the best for the kind of work to which the world’s more liberal governments preferred to turn a blind eye. Their body armour turned aside both bullets and plasma-shot and flooded their systems with controlled bursts of adrenalin, the muscular reinforcements of the suits turning a simple blow into a neck-breaker; self-steering bullets followed their targets even when the fools ran from them, blowing brains like gory fireworks across stuccoed walls. Virtanen’s hand-print on the hilt of his lightknife triggered the plasma-blade and a sweep of his arm took off a man’s head, the stump of the neck already cauterised when the body crumpled to the carpet.

By then the shrieks of alarms were warring with the vicious drumming of gunfire and the gut-clenching whine of plasma-shot, the house’s inhabitants screaming, yelling while their guards did the best they could to protect them. They were quite good, Virtanen noted dispassionately, but at this hour none of them had been in body-armour and without it the mercenaries’ better training and equipment trumped numbers. The tiny mosquito-drones scattered through the house and the x-ray function on the mercs’ lenses meant there was nowhere for their prey to hide and no chance for them to sneak up on the house’s invaders; Virtanen and his people shot the unprepared idiots right through the walls and swept through them like a gene-virus[7], leaving bodies behind them like litter.

Teague and her squad blew the east wing and the house rocked, but Virtanen didn’t so much as stumble as he walked into the command centre. A bodyguard raised his weapon and Sarich shot him smoothly over Virtanen’s shoulder, and there he was, Landon White himself, until tonight the most dangerous man on the Texas Gulf. _He_ had made it into a very nice suit of armour—looked like the new stuff coming out of India, too, Virtanen noticed with a flash of indignant covetousness, and when White raised an arm to fire he knew better than to trust in his own shielding. Neon-green plasma-shot streaked from White’s gauntlet and Virtanen fired in the same instant, rattlesnake-quick. Poisonous green and fiery ice-white met in mid-air like stars slamming together and winked out as if dawn had come early, but White was already bolting: turned and ran without pausing to sweep the hood-helmet of his armour up and into place over his head, trusting in his armour to protect his back—a trust borne out, atom[8] him, when the blizzard of plasma-fire from the mercenaries fizzled out like wet sparks despite hitting vital targets—back of the neck, between the shoulders, right over the man’s _heart_ —every atomising time—

<The fuck’s he going?> Idrisi demanded, but Virtanen was already calling up the building’s specs as White disappeared through the far door.

He had to blink when he found the answer. <A room with no other exits,> he answered, hardly able to believe White could be so impossibly stupid. <I’m taking point.>

He didn’t have to warn them to be on guard for traps; it was hard to imagine that this could be anything _but_ a trap. White had green-grade plasma-shot that could have made mincemeat of their armour—and instead of using it was willingly throwing himself into a corner he couldn’t escape?

Whatever that other room was, the walls were lead-lined; Virtanen’s lenses couldn’t see through them to get a fix on White. _The old-fashioned way it is,_ he thought, and carefully edged towards the door White had left open behind him. At least the lead meant White couldn’t see Virtanen or his people, either…

He waited a moment, listening, the bio-ware[9] in his ears straining. But all he could hear was White’s Texan cursing, both furious and frantic; the soft beep of a scanner and the heavy, thick sound of a reinforced door being opened…

Virtanen swung through the doorway, wary of letting White escape through some bolt-hole they’d missed when they’d checked out the building. But no; there was no escape hatch, only a massive metal box like an old-fashioned safe sitting in the corner, and as White turned from opening it to face him Virtanen shot him through the head.

<This is why we always wear our hoods-up, kiddies,> Idrisi drawled, slipping into the room just in time to see White collapse. <So the bad man can’t get you with a head-shot.>

Virtanen made the hand-signal that would tell his team’s hiveware that objective two—White’s death—was accomplished. _The king is dead_. Of course, by the end of the week there would be a new king of this trash-heap of a territory, but that was not Virtanen’s problem.

 _Let’s see what you were running for_ , he thought, disarming the gauntlets of his armour and walking over to the box White spent his last moments in life to reach.

<Hostiles all exxed, sir,> Sarich said, checking in with the rest of the teams. <But no sign of Target One. Teague wants to know if you want them to start taking the house apart for hidden rooms.>

Virtanen kicked White’s corpse aside and bent down to peer into the box. If it had been him, he would have been going for a truly nasty piece of weaponry, something that stood a chance of saving him from a full-out invasion of his home base that had slaughtered all his toy soldiers—

It wasn’t a weapon.

<No need, lieutenant,> Virtanen answered, his optics adjusting to the dim light within the box. <I think we just found him.>

The thing in the box was a young man, naked but for a sensory-deprivation ‘blackout’ hood bound snugly around his head. Except for two small holes positioned over his nostrils to let him breathe, he was entirely hidden behind the thick black fabric, and Virtanen knew from his own experience with the things that there would be built-in patches over the eyes and ears, just to make absolutely certain the wearer was cut off from anything outside the hood. The boy had been bound in place on his knees; the reinforced ‘spine’ of the hood forced his head into a bow, and the collar locked in place over it was fastened to the walls of the box by three separate chains each thicker than Virtanen’s thumb. A steel bar locked his ankles together, and another chain fastened the manacles at his wrists to the bar, ensuring there was no way he could straighten up or shift position.

It was overkill even for a man as fucked-up in his tastes as White was purported to be, and Virtanen was willing to bet on the face he would find under that hood.

His hiveware registered Idrisi’s approach behind him, and his ears caught the Pakistani’s hiss of shock.

Sarich followed, but if she felt her partner’s revulsion she kept it to herself. <The scanner’s picking up on a pressure plate beneath him, sir,> she said after a beat. <But it looks like it was disabled when the door was opened. I think it’s safe to take him out.>

<The collar?> Virtanen asked. His lenses weren’t flagging anything, but then he didn’t have the same level of scanners in his eyes that his lieutenant did, and it would be a blood-borne[10] nuisance to kill the boy at this stage by triggering some kind of suicide function in the collar.

There was a brief pause. <I’m not getting anything, sir. I think it’s just decorative.>

He flicked his finger for _acknowledged_ , then reached for his lightblade.

The young man hadn’t moved during the mercenaries’ conversation; if not for the steady rise and fall of his chest, Virtanen would have wondered if White had put him into some kind of stasis. But of course, with the hood, he couldn’t have been aware of them, might not even have known the door of his cage had been opened if the box had been built to deny him the kinetic vibrations such a gesture would usually trigger. The kind thing to do would have been to place his hand on the boy’s chest, let him know someone else was present and that he should brace for the hood’s removal. But Virtanen wasn’t paid for kindness. His lightblade sliced through the links tying collar to walls as if they were paperchains at a birthday party without bothering with a warning, and though he must have felt the sudden slackening of tension as they fell away, Target One didn’t react until Virtanen gently but dispassionately closed his hand around the boy’s throat, just under the jaw, to hold him still as he cut open the collar.

A tremor passed through the young man’s body, a shiver of fear or dread or perhaps desperate relief at feeling _something_ after however long he’d been in the box.

Virtanen paused to see if he’d do it again—a plasma-blade could and would go through meat and bone like water, and a twitch while the knife was against his throat could end in disaster—but the boy stayed still.

Virtanen tightened his grip just in case, and carefully cut away the collar. It fell to the floor of the box with a metallic clang, and Virtanen switched off his knife and dragged the hood away.

Even under the hood, the boy was wearing a black band of some clingy, stretchy fabric around his eyes, and plugs in his ears. Virtanen carefully removed these latter first; when he held one up to his own ear, he heard the static hum of white noise.

 _Overkill,_ he thought again, rolling his eyes, and tossed the buds away. The next to go was the apparatus—Virtanen had no idea what the thing’s proper name was—in the boy’s mouth; a lovely piece of work, wires fastened around the boy’s head to lock a kind of mouthguard over his teeth and force his tongue flat, with little screws at the corners of his lips for locking his mouth open or closed as desired. Virtanen took a picture with his lenses, idly making a note to pick one up for his own toybox later, and set about removing the thing.

Soon enough that was cast aside too—and then Virtanen took a light grip of the boy’s chin and tipped his still-bowed head up into the light, dragging away the blindfold with his other hand.

And for a beat all he could see were eyes green as plasma-fire.

He’d been expecting pretty, maybe even lovely if the exxtaxa[11] who’d bought and sold him had taken care not to physically damage him. Ugly or even average-looking individuals were rarely the targets of white-slave traffickers, and the case files had included stills taken just before the then-twelve-year-old had disappeared. He’d been pretty then, pretty enough for the original kidnappers to sell him on when they got their ransom and make off with two cases of credits instead of one. But in the intervening seven years, _pretty_ had grown into _breath-taking,_ the kind too raw and real to come from a sculptor’s[12] knife; sharp and feral and elfin, with cheekbones you could open your wrists on and a mouth—now that it was freed from the cruel toy that had caged it—like a sweep of calligraphy, so perfect it begged to be ruined. Skin the colour of pale honey from a splash of Mediterranean ancestry a few generations back, and hair the dark gold of ancient treasure, both conspiring to frame those atomising eyes like the setting around a pair of gems…

And he was staring at Virtanen like a believer come face to face with his god.

Virtanen felt a hot tug in his groin. No wonder White had paid almost two hundred grand for this. If Virtanen had the credits lying around, he’d have snapped up a toy like this too. No natural gene-print was this alluring; if the parents hadn’t custom-designed their son’s genetics, he’d eat a cow[13].

“Arian Jernigan?” he asked. His lenses were already running a preliminary comparison between the boy’s face and that of his twelve-year-old self, but the result that flashed at him when it was done— _97.4% likelihood of match—_ didn’t surprise him in the least. He could see for himself that this was the same boy, aged up and beautified. But a voice print wouldn’t hurt.

Those green eyes blinked at him, the pupils huge, dark vortexes. Probably drugged, however much he’d like to take that expression of awed wonderment as a stroke to his ego; Virtanen made a note to test the boy’s blood for toxins asap.

 “Are you Arian Jernigan?” Virtanen asked again, when no other response was forthcoming.

“No.” Without taking his chin from Virtanen’s hand, the boy—who clearly _was_ Jernigan—tilted his head to the side, the gesture both kittenish and eerie, intrigued and intriguing. He glanced past Virtanen—and presumably caught sight of the corpse of his most recent owner, because without so much as a flicker of expression he looked back up at him and asked, “Are you my new master?”

 _Oh, if only, kitten._ But with the parents wanting every moment of his interaction with their son recorded, it was unlikely he’d get the chance to test-drive that mouth—and the rest of him—before handing him into the arms of his loving family. Virtanen suppressed a sigh and reluctantly put the fantasy away. “No,” he said evenly. “Did you used to be known as Arian Jernigan?”

“Mmm.” The boy sighed and nuzzled into Virtanen’s hand, rubbing his cheek against the palm of his body-armour. He shuddered, his eyes falling half-lidded in obvious pleasure, and Virtanen forced himself to wonder how long the boy had been deprived of any and all sensation in the box instead of dragging him out of it and fucking him over White’s corpse. Nothing got the blood pumping like a firefight, and Jernigan’s atomising hedonism wasn’t helping the urge to reaffirm just how alive he still was by crashing into another warm, yielding body.

The lick of frustration pushed Virtanen into fisting his free hand in Jernigan’s hair and yanking his head back, manfully ignoring the sweet little gasp it earned him. “Pay attention. Did you used to be known as Arian Jernigan?”

That hooded gaze glinted at him, a sharp malachite gleam—and before Virtanen’s eyes the boy _shifted_ , the kitten-persona falling away like a cham-camo cloak to reveal something very different underneath. It was too subtle a thing to put into words, and too obvious to miss; the mouth melting into a mocking whip of a curve, something in the line of shoulders and jaw and the precise angle of the eyelids speaking of a knowing, taunting sensuality, amused and scornful and challenging, those absinthe greens _daring_ him to do—something.

But the boy said not a word.

“Ah,” Virtanen murmured, pitching his voice low and silken, and knowing he’d guessed correctly when his Target One shuddered again, the playful derision draining out of his face and his lips parting, gone breathless, pupils grown swollen and ripe just for that one syllable, said just right. “You only answer to your master, don’t you?”

Staring at Virtanen’s face as if laser-locked, the boy nodded, once and wordless.

“Well, in that case, darling…” Virtanen reached up and pulled the hood-helmet of his armour away, the stiff, metal-tough fabric relaxing into cotton-softness as it fell back around his shoulders and gave the boy his first real look at his rescuer. He knew what his Target One saw: the hard, powerfully elegant face of a man in his late forties, his short hair Aryan-blond and his Nordic skin weathered and darkened by decades of a soldier’s work, all of it coming together in eyes hard and cold and blue as the Arctic ice. “I _am_ your master now.”

He unfolded from his knees—and hauled the boy out of the atomised box with him, his fist clenched tight and vicious in that thick blond hair. Still bound hand and foot Jernigan could do nothing but be dragged, but the liquid-amber _keen_ it tore from his throat hit Virtanen like a lightknife to the gut, all plasma-heat cauterising even as it pierced him; the sound thick and desperate and _needing_ , every bit as sweet as if Virtanen had paid for it, and the mercenary wasn’t faking it nearly as much as he should have been when he shoved the boy’s head down inches from White’s still-warm gore-splattered face.

If the parents objected, he could quite honestly say this was the only way to safely deal with the little ‘mastery’ issue.

“You see this?” Virtanen hissed, dropping down behind the little wretch to press the words directly into his ear; his stomach clenched tight and hot to feel how the brush of his lips set the boy to trembling, made a whimper catch like a silver hook in his throat. “I killed him. I killed your last master. That makes you mine, _kulta **[14]**_. Do you understand? You are _mine_ , and you are going to start acting like it or I will wrap a choke collar so tight around that pretty throat of yours you’ll never breathe again. Because I have no blood-borne use for sluts that _can’t fucking behave.”_

He shook him roughly, and had no name for the noise the boy made in response, a razor-wire tangle of moan and sob, choked and fervent and wrecked. He only knew that it lit his blood like a match dropped in oil, made him long to shove the little baggage down over White’s body and seal his claim between those chained legs, make him _really_ shriek…

“Now.” He dragged the boy up instead, away from the corpse, turned him so they were face to face. Without glancing at Sarich and Idrisi—neither of whom had reacted to their Colonel’s brutal treatment of the young man they’d been hired to rescue, but then, they knew as well as he did why it was necessary—he tipped that too-pretty face up to his. “Tell me. Did you used to be known as Arian Jernigan?”

“Once upon a time,” the boy breathed. His eyes had darkened, but there was a broken-glass glitter in them; if anything, his pupils seemed even bigger, deep and black enough to fall into. “Long _long_ ago and _very_ far away, that’s what my nametag said. I came when they called it.” He tilted his head as much as Virtanen’s grip allowed. “I don’t now.”

Mindfucked. That wasn’t the name the doctors would give it when they brought Jernigan back to his parents, but it was what they called it on the street: broken, mad, jacked and hacked and shattered. Someone had tried to rewrite Jernigan’s personality and psyche into whatever it was they’d wanted—probably an eager and adoring sex-doll; that was a favourite among White’s kind of scum—but they’d bombed it, toppled the Jenga tower instead of building the temple to their own ego that they’d been aiming for. Virtanen had recognised the signs the moment the kid’s personality started morphing like an atom-bombed[15] ditto-bot[16]; he’d seen too many failed sex-pets in this line of work not to. Mindfucked victims nearly always retained some vestige of their intended programming, and if that programming was denied, they could go nuclear—hence Virtanen’s calculated risk in treating the boy the way other rescued slaves, over the years, had needed him to treat _them_. It was the only way to keep them even in sight of sanity until a specialist could take over treatment and start putting their original personalities back together.

Which was usually about as much use as trying to unscramble an egg, but since Virtanen wouldn’t be the one footing the bill, he didn’t give a quark[17].

Of course, sometimes they just went nuclear anyway. Without a detailed psychological history and about, oh, eleven years of specialist training, Virtanen had no way to predict what the kid’s triggers might be—but he would bet half the payment for this job that the boy had them. He’d already displayed the unstable, fluid personality-morphing that was the signature of someone who’d had their sense of self shredded into confetti, the inside of their head Blitzed to kingdom come. Keeping him in one piece all the way home could yet prove to be a blood-borne minefield.

And it didn’t explain what the atom White had been thinking, running for the kid’s box when he could have been making his escape. Protecting his investment? Or was his toy just that good in bed that the man was already addicted, and wouldn’t leave without him? He wouldn’t have thought White was that enslaved to his hungers, but then, he _had_ been obsessed enough with the boy to drop six figures on him.

“And what do you answer to now, sweetheart?” Virtanen crooned, gentling his grip on the boy’s hair. Well, he’d warned the Jernigans that getting their son back nuerotypical would take a miracle; after seven years in the hands of human traffickers and slave traders, it was almost impossible to imagine someone _not_ trying to mindhack the boy. It was a pity the hack had failed—a successful programming was _far_ easier to reverse than a failed one, and Virtanen really wouldn’t have minded the trip back to Europe with a silky, worshipful little kitten to keep him company—but it wasn’t his problem. No doubt the Jernigans would throw their son at the best specialists money could buy, and eventually someone would put some semblance of sanity back together behind those eyes…

“Pet,” the boy said promptly, “slut, _cola_ , marionette,” Virtanen’s cock twitched at that one, “Chimaera, cocksheath, fuckmeat—”

He snapped his fingers behind his back, and it took Virtanen a second to understand. When he did, the surge of lust that hit him was _unspeakable_.

Jernigan went on, slipping in and out of half a dozen languages, but Virtanen shook his head. “Enough. Chimaera it is.” That was the only one of them that hadn’t been a slur of one kind or another, and he wondered who had had the wit and the taste for irony to name a mindfucked boy after a creature composed of multiple zygotes. He doubted it was White. “I’m going to finish getting you free, Chimaera, and then you’ll be coming with us. We’re taking you back to your parents.”

Chimaera laughed at him, the sound shockingly bright and innocent, almost child-like. The line of his throat wanted a collar like a prince’s brow wanted a crown. “Fleshlights don’t have parents,” he grinned when he was done.

“This one does,” Virtanen said shortly, his patience starting to fray. “Now hold still.”

Immediately Chimaera became a statue of meat, still and taut as golden stone. Virtanen paused in the act of activating his knife, but when Chimaera continued to barely breathe he got on with it, quickly and neatly slicing away the manacles and remaining chains. He was braced for the boy to fall against him once he was free, but if his muscles were an agony of cramps and strain he gave no sign of it. When Virtanen rose to his feet and warily signalled for Chimaera to do the same, the boy sprang upright as lightly as a ballerina, apparently unaffected by his confinement. He didn’t so much ignore White’s body as seem completely unaware of it, as blind to it as to his own nakedness.

Virtanen wished he could be as indifferent to the latter. Straightened up, Chimaera was built like a dancer or swimmer— _or a pleasure slave,_ came the inevitable thought—his gold skin pulled smooth over lithe muscle, slender and graceful. He could probably move quickly, if White had kept him fit and fed, but he wasn’t going to be lifting weights any time soon. A quick glance showed up no scars, but then, those would have been treated, wiped away like imperfections in wet clay. His owners would have wanted him kept pretty, unmarked but for what they themselves marked him with—and those would have been erased when he was sold on to the next junkgene[18] exxtaxon. White evidently hadn’t had time to mark up his new toy yet.

Well, the parents would be pleased. They’d be less delighted with the almost painful-looking arousal currently hard between their son’s thighs, and Virtanen made an effort to keep his gaze above Chimaera’s waist. His lenses were recording all of this, after all; bad enough he’d had to claim the boy, it was probably best the Jernigans didn’t review the footage and realise the man they’d hired to rescue their son had been staring at his cock.

<Lieutenant, run his gene print against the parents’,> Virtanen ordered, marshalling his thoughts. <Confirm we’re not wasting our time on the wrong boytoy, please. And run a tox screen on him while you’re at it.>

Sarich gestured acknowledgement of the command. <Shall I find him something to wear too, sir?> she asked with deceptive mildness.

He smirked at her. <Must you ruin _all_ my fun, lieutenant? >

<It _is_ my job, sir. >

Swallowing his laughter—atom, but she always knew just how to unwind him—Virtanen placed his fingertips—the armour-glove thin enough to bear the whorls of his prints—against Chimaera’s cheek.

Those green eyes fluttered at his touch, the longing that swept across his face a drugged-like craving.

And he, Virtanen, was the boy’s drug now. He challenged anyone to find that aught but a vicious thrill.

“These people are going to take care of you,” he told his new pet, keeping his voice casual. A master with no doubt his desires would be obeyed, because they _would_ be. “You are to obey them as you would me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Chimaera whispered.

“Good boy,” Virtanen crooned. Chimaera whimpered, a jewel spilled out of his throat. Virtanen wanted to bite it out of his mouth; he stroked his thumb across the boy’s cheek instead, savoured his willow-wind shudder. “I have some things to do, but I will see you later. Behave now.”

“Yes,” Chimaera said again, a breathless breath.

His eyes fell closed, an expression like pain sweeping across his face as Virtanen pulled away from him. But he didn’t protest, and when it was obvious that Virtanen’s leaving wasn’t going to trigger him, the mercenary relaxed, and swept quickly from the room before his self-control gave way to rank stupidity.

<Anyone seriously injured?> he sent out on a hive-wide link. <No? No? Excellent. On the road in fifteen, luddites[19], I want to see dawn rise over the Atlantic. If I visit this Muse-forsaken country again in the next decade it will be too blood-borne soon!>

* * *

 

[1] Body-bods for closed-circuit sub-vocal and non-verbal communications with individuals who are part of the circuit.

[2] ‘Chameleon’-camouflage, biotech which bends light without using batteries, mirrors, or cameras. Blocks thermal and infrared scanners.

[3] Short-bladed ‘lightsaber’; a plasma-blade.

[4] Battery-tabs; when activated, release a steady supply of electrical energy for short-term fueling of devices.

[5] Hand-held device for making digital or holographic copies of images.

[6] Non-binary individuals

[7] An artificial virus designed to target specific genes or those who carry specific genes.

[8] A curse; reference to the atom bomb.

[9] Body mods whose purpose is to augment the natural functions of the human body.

[10] A curse; reference to blood-borne disease.

[11] An insult referencing the ‘dead end’ of a phylogenetic branch; the end of a biological taxon. Genetically defunct. Singular form = exxtaxon.

[12] Plastic surgeon.

[13] Eating organic meat is no longer commonly practised in most countries and is generally viewed as distasteful if not outright barbaric, with exceptions made for health reasons. Various meat substitutes now provide the necessary protein intake for most of the planet.

[14] Finnish endearment: literally ‘gold’, used in the sense of ‘darling’.

[15] Curse, equivalent to ‘god-damned’.

[16] A ‘soft robot’, able to change shape to react to different stimuli or environments, typically built out of metal/foam hybrid materials.

[17] An elementary particle, the smallest known to modern physics.

[18] Insult; reference to junk DNA, or useless genetic material.

[19] Insult/slang for someone who is obsolete/can’t keep up with reality.


End file.
